PUFFIN CLASSICS
A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850–94) was born into a famous Edinburgh engineering family. His middle name was originally Lewis, but Robert changed the spelling, while keeping the pronunciation. His father wanted him to become an engineer, but Robert's constant ill health pushed him towards an indoor job. After studying law, he was called to the Scottish Bar in 1875; but he made little effort as a lawyer, since he was already trying to make his mark in the world of literature. He published a number of essays and articles and accounts of travels: he travelled widely all his life, in search of a climate which suited him. Success eluded him, however, until 1883 when Treasure Island was published.
Where all the greatest writers for children are concerned, it is probably true to say that the child-in-them never died. Nothing illustrates this better in the case of Robert Louis Stevenson than A Child's Garden of Verses. Published when he was thirty-five years old, every poem without exception captures the freshness, innocence and beauty of a child's vision of the world. It is clear that the ‘child’ in the title refers as much to the author as to any of the thousands of children who have enjoyed reading the poems over the years.
Stevenson was vivacious with a strong voice and gestures, but he was abnormally thin. He was in fact more or less an invalid from the 1880s onward and probably suffered from tuberculosis. In the late 1880s he left California for a holiday with his family in the Polynesian islands of the Pacific, fell in love with the islands, settled on Samoa and never left. The natives called him Tusitala, which means ‘teller of tales’. He is buried high on a Samoan hill and his grave bears the following moving epitaph:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Some other Puffin Classics to enjoy
PETER PAN
J. M. Barrie
ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
Lewis Carroll
PINOCCHIO
Carlo Collodi
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
A Child's Garden of Verses
Decorations by
EVE GARNETT
PUFFIN BOOKS
PUFFIN BOOKS
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First published 1885
Published in Puffin Books 1948
New edition 1952
Reissued 1994
26
All rights reserved
Filmset by Datix International Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193494-5
CONTENTS
How the Verses were Written
Dedication
Bed in Summer
A Thought
At the Seaside
Young Night Thought
Whole Duty of Children
Rain
Pirate Story
Foreign Lands
Windy Nights
Travel
Singing
Looking Forward
A Good Play
Where Go the Boats?
Auntie's Skirts
The Land of Counterpane
The Land of Nod
My Shadow
System
A Good Boy
Escape at Bedtime
Marching Song
The Cow
Happy Thought
The Wind
Keepsake Mill
Good and Bad Children
The Sun's Travels
The Lamplighter
My Bed is a Boat
The Moon
The Swing
Time to Rise
Looking-glass River
Fairy Bread
From a Railway Carriage
Winter-time
The Hayloft
Farewell to the Farm
North-west Passage:
1 Good Night
2 Shadow March
3 In Port
THE CHILD ALONE
The Unseen Playmate
My Ship and I
My Kingdom
Picture-books in Winter
My Treasures
Block City
The Land of Story-books
Armies in the Fire
The Little Land
GARDEN DAYS
Night and Day
Nest Eggs
The Flowers
Summer Sun
The Dumb Soldier
Autumn Fires
The Gardener
Historical Associations
ENVOYS
To Willie and Henrietta
To My Mother
To Auntie
To Minnie
To My Name-child
To Any Reader
Index of First Lines
HOW THE VERSES WERE WRITTEN
‘These are rhymes, jingles; I don't go in for eternity and the three unities,’ Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to his friend Sydney Colvin of these verses. ‘I would just as soon call 'em “Rimes for Children” as anything else. I am not proud nor particular.’
And he told his devoted old nurse, Alison Cunningham – ‘Cummy’ as he called her – that the little book was all about his childhood and should, therefore, be dedicated to no other person ‘but you who did so much to make that childhood happy… and as the only person who will really understand it.’… ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘this is only a flourish, like taking off one's hat, but still a person who has taken the trouble to write things, does not dedicate them to anyone without meaning it; and you must try to take this dedication in place of a great many things I might have said and ought to have done.’
Cummy had stayed with him throughout his childhood, which he described as being ‘in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days, and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than of that other land of counterpane’.
Always delicate, he was subject as a child to attacks of croup – that dreaded haunter of Victorian homes – and other bronchial troubles; but he was fortunate in his nurse, who watched over him through the interminable nights, diverting him and indulging herself – for she had a great love of and feeling for words – by repeating in her rich Lowland accent, hymns, the metrical versions of the Psalms and the old tales of the Covenanters. One of young Louis's favourite games was to play at being Minister and holding Service in the Kirk.
The first batch of these verses came to him at Braemar in the intervals of writing The Sea Cook, or Treasur
e Island, a Story for Boys, as he called it while it was still in its early chapters. The words were running off his pen as fast as his hand could shape the letters. It was a glorious moment of creation and achievement. He was confident of success and had his young stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, beside him, providing an enthusiastic audience.
During the next four years (from 1881 to 1884) the rest of the rhymes were written, some in sadly different circumstances; as when he lay in the half darkness of a sickroom at Hyères with his right arm tied to his side to lessen the risk of further haemorrhage. He was accustomed to illness; and as he lay there, unable to read, hardly able to speak, his mind must surely have wandered back into those vivid memories of far-off days to pass the time, recalling with the peculiar clearness that comes in illness, not only the great occasions but also the little things, the smell of frost, the look of his own small footprints in new snow, the feel of darkness, the brilliance of spring days and the richness of summer.
Was it from a memory of himself sailing boats on the Water of Leith, that he wrote ‘Where Go the Boats?’, playing, as he often must have done, while staying with his grandfather at the Manse at Colinton?
‘Do you remember,’ he asked Cummy, ‘making the whistle at Mount Chessie? I do not think it was my knife; I believe it was yours; but rhyme is a great monarch and goes before honesty, in these affairs at least.’ This little incident is told in ‘My Treasures’ (see page 64).
Those years at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties were rich ones for children with their annual yield of lovely picture-books by Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and Walter Crane, cheap to buy but beautifully produced. New ideas were in the air, and it was suggested that Stevenson should provide a volume of stories for Caldecott to illustrate. He was thrilled with the idea, but somehow it came to nothing and, when his Verses were ready to be illustrated, Caldecott's health was already giving way (he died in the February of 1884) and Steven-son suggested either of the other great names, preferably Crane, as artist; but this, too, came to nothing, and the book was published in the spring of 1885 without any pictures.
Much had happened since those joyful days when the first verses were written and Stevenson hardly knew whether to be pleased or otherwise when he first looked on the completed volume; but he had caught the spirit of those childish experiences so truly that he could not be cast down for long and though he wrote to Edmund Gosse: ‘I have now published, on 101 small pages, The Complete Proof of Mr R. L. Stevenson's Incapacity to Write Verses… They look ghastly in the cold light of print!’ yet he had also to admit that there was ‘something nice in the little ragged regiment’ and that ‘they seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly – not song, if you will, but a child's voice.’
ELEANOR GRAHAM
Note: The quotations are all taken from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Sydney Colvin.
Dedication
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
FROM HER BOY
For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read,
For all the pains you comforted,
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:–
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life –
From the sick child, now well and old,
And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!
R. L. S.
BED IN SUMMER
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
A THOUGHT
It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink,
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place.
AT THE SEASIDE
When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole the sea came up
Till it could come no more.
YOUNG NIGHT THOUGHT
All night long, and every night,
When my mamma puts out the light,
I see the people marching by,
As plain as day, before my eye.
Armies and emperors and kings,
All carrying different kinds of things,
And marching in so grand a way,
You never saw the like by day.
So fine a show was never seen
At the great circus on the green;
For every kind of beast and man
Is marching in that caravan.
At first they move a little slow,
But still the faster on they go,
And still beside them close I keep
Until we reach the town of Sleep.
WHOLE DUTY OF CHILDREN
A child should always say what's true,
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table:
At least as far as he is able.
RAIN
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.
PIRATE STORY
Three of us afloat in the meadow by the swing,
Three of us aboard in the basket on the lea.
Winds are in the air, they are blowing in the spring,
And waves are on the meadows like the waves there are at sea.
Where shall we adventure, to-day that we're afloat,
Wary of the weather and steering by a star?
Shall it be to Africa, a-steering of the boat,
To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar?
Hi! but here's a squadron a-rowing on the sea –
Cattle on the meadow a-charging with a roar!
Quick, and we'll escape them, they're as mad as they can be.
The wicket is the harbour and the garden is the shore.
FOREIGN LANDS
Up into the cherry-tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.
I saw the next-door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.
I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.
If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,
To where the roads on either hand
Lean onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.
WINDY NIGHTS
Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wi
nd is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then
By he comes back at the gallop again.
TRAVEL
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie,
And, watched by cockatoos and goats,
Lonely Crusoes building boats;
Where in sunshine reaching out
Eastern cities, miles about,
Are with mosque and minaret
Among sandy gardens set,
And the rich goods from near and far
Hang for sale in the bazaar;
Where the Great Wall round China goes,
And on one side the desert blows,
And with bell and voice and drum,
Cities on the other hum;
Where are forests, hot as fire,
Wide as England, tall as a spire,
Full of apes and coco-nuts
And the negro hunters' huts;
Where the knotty crocodile
Lies and blinks in the Nile,
And the red flamingo flies
Hunting fish before his eyes;
Where in jungles, near and far,
Man-devouring tigers are,
Lying close and giving ear
Lest the hunt be drawing near,
Or a comer-by be seen
Swinging in a palanquin;
Where among the desert sands
Some deserted city stands,
All its children, sweep and prince,